Cookie Week: Sugar Cookies

This might be my favorite post in my favorite week. Favorite. Cookies are my achilles heel. I can't ever turn one down. To say the least, I was excited for Ceri and I to have this time together with our daugh­ters mak­ing treats for the hol­i­days. And, hell, if I end up hav­ing to eat some cook­ies then I'm here to take one for the team.

With all the bazil­lion hol­i­day cookie recipes out there in the uni­verse, we thought it was best to do a sim­ple sugar cookie. I also found this great recipe that used whole wheat pas­try flour and wasen't too loaded with but­ter. As you can see, this wasn't a bak­ing com­pe­ti­tion yeild­ing per­fect look­ing spec­i­mens of snow­men and stars. These are cook­ies made by kids, for fam­i­lies. It's exactly how the hol­i­days should look and feel–perfectly imper­fect. I couldn't love these cook­ies more.

In a large bowl, beat but­ter and sugar until fluffy and then add vanilla and egg whites. Mix until blended. Slowly add flour mix­ture into the but­ter and sugar. When the ingre­di­ents are fully blended, roll dough into a ball and wrap with plas­tic wrap or waxed paper and then place in the refrig­er­a­tor for at least 3 hours, or up to 24 hours.

Pre­heat oven to 350.

Remove dough from refrig­er­a­tor and let it sit for a few min­utes to come to room temperature. Coat a rolling pin as well as a clean sur­face with flour. Roll out dough until it's about 1/4 inch thick. Using a cookie cut­ter in the shape of your choice, cut cook­ies from dough. Rework scraps into a ball and cut out more cookies.

Place cook­ies on greased bak­ing sheet and bake for 6 to 8 min­utes. Allow cook­ies to cool on sheet for a few min­utes and then trans­fer them to a cookie rack so they can com­pletely cool.

As you can see, we didn't have two rolling pins. The girls found it hys­ter­i­cal that they had to use a wine bot­tle. If only we could have corked it for the mommys.

Scar­lett could have sat at the table all day cut­ting those things out.

I made a home­made frost­ing the girls used to decorate. We didn't want any unnec­es­sary food col­or­ing (we already had a ton of candy), so I left it white.

Esme had fun eat­ing the frost­ing off the mixer.

I crushed candy cane's in the food proces­sor and put out red hots and other hol­i­day themed sweeties.

I'm pretty sure the girls weren't fussed by the messy hands. It def­i­nitely wasn't tor­ture to have to lick them clean. It was just tor­ture get­ting it off the floor. But, hey, who's looking.